How Covid has changed Customer Interaction
Reading: 5 mins
“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change. ”
In the history of this century, there's pre-Covid, then there's the Covid Era and hopefully there will be a post-Covid era. But in a time of uncertainty, one thing that is certain is that everything has changed since early 2020 and that includes marketing.
Covid has affected the way we communicate, the way we interact, the way we travel, the way we consume and the way we think. It's likely some of these changes will be permanent.
There had already been a steady shift in marketing from more 'traditional' channels to digital and this looked set to continue. But the arrival of the pandemic threw the projected timeline of this shift up in the air and gave its ass a mighty kick to bring unprecedented levels of change.
Salesforce have just released the 7th edition of their State of Marketing Report, with data collected from 8,200 marketing managers in 37 countries on six continents, that examines the trends and changes in the last year. Here we'll be looking at the key findings of the report, how customer interaction has been affected by Covid and what this all means for video personalization.
And yes, I know we're all just tired of Covid by now and want it to go away, but this is important.
Summary of the Report
Eighty-eight percent of CMOs say their marketing must transform in order to be competitive.
48% say their Digital engagement strategy has changed completely.
The biggest takeaway from the report is that despite seeing massive levels of disruption and change, marketers are optimistic about the future. Covid has simply accelerated the change that was already happening, forcing marketers to re-evaluate the way they do business and the relationship with their customers. As the saying goes, necessity is mother of invention. The two key factors that are both the main priority and the main challenge for marketers is innovating to meet the changing needs of customers and interacting with them in real time.
“The speed of change over the last year has propelled us towards never-before-seen levels of marketing innovation. We tried new things, learned hard lessons, got back up and kept on going. It’s amazing to think of how far we’ve come with the digital experiences we can now deliver, built with a relentless focus on the success of our care giving customers and partners.”
77% of marketers feel their work provides greater value now than it did a year ago.
72% of marketers say meeting customer expectations is more difficult than a year ago.
With more people spending a greater part of their lives online with a digital experience, customer expectations are evolving and increasing. The majority of today's customers grew up in the internet age and are tech-literate. The embracing of the on-line world has been relatively smooth and with this has come the expectation of an increasingly personalized experience. Covid has accelerated this process so that customers today expect an experience that is relevant, convenient, predictive and immediate.
To meet these higher expectations, there is increasing pressure to use data to speed up decision making and create greater relevance in customer interactions. This in turn will strengthen brand share of voice as customers look for reliable guidance on products and services to buy.
This is why recent innovations like video personalization are likely to become increasingly applicable and widespread in the future. Video personalization uses technological breakthroughs, combined with psychology, to create a more satisfactory and engaging customer experience. By using data in a smart and positive way, it is able to create messaging that is directly relevant to a customer’s personal circumstances. It can act as a personal assistant to give information or advice or it can help to strengthen a customer’s connection to the brand through insight and familiarity.
Photo by Nothing Ahead from Pexels
61% of customers expect to spend more time online after the pandemic than they did before.
69% of customers say companies should offer new ways to get products and services due to COVID-19.
Social media, digital ads, and video are the three most common means of reaching customers. Video is the channel with the biggest increases in value over the past year. Even traditionally physical channels like events and sponsorships are now adopting digital practices.
The need to be agile in messaging is an approach that has been bought into the limelight through necessity. With quickly shifting social conditions brought on by lockdowns and restrictions, an ad that might be acceptable one week could rapidly become unacceptable and irrelevant by the next.
Eighty-three percent of marketers say their ability to meet customer expectations depends on their digital capabilities.
83% say their work will be more technology-driven after the pandemic than before.
78% of marketers say their customer engagement is data-driven.
The ability to gather and use data is becoming more and more important. Known digital identities such as email addresses and social IDs are now the most popular customer data sources, followed by transactional data and declared interests. Meanwhile, offline identities such as postal addresses and anonymized digital identities like cookies and device IDs saw the largest decreases in popularity.
The rising use of data is seeing an equal rise in the use of CRM platforms to manage data effectively as they become more sophisticated. The top uses of CRMs are for customer insight, consent management and personalization.
Privacy
61% of consumers feel like they’ve lost control over how their personal information is used (up from 46% in 2019).
It's been more than three years since the European Union’s GDPR took effect and marketers are slowly getting used to the limitations placed on the use of customer data. 78% of marketers say they have a comprehensive view of all customer consent management and are actively working to improve it.
But there is still an urgent need to use data more effectively, driven by technology, to meet consumer privacy concerns. With Google delaying its plans to remove third party cookies until 2023, this has given some breathing space to the speed of implementation. Higher expectations leading to a more hyper-personalized experience cannot be met with a one-size-fits-all approach and there is still a need to create better understanding and trust in the way data is used to improve the digital experience.
`` Photo by Ian Taylor on Unsplash
Embracing the Future
Covid has fundamentally disrupted the way that marketing functions with the upheaval forcing marketers to reappraise the way they communicate with customers and create meaningful relationships. It is a time of reappraisal and innovation but marketers are optimistic and excited by the opportunities this can bring. The brakes have been taken off the slow digital revolution and it is now full-steam ahead with companies likely to be left behind unless they can show agility and innovation in their approach. Customers now need to be targeted based on their needs and values and spoken to in a language that is relevant to them.
It is no longer enough to just have a great product. It’s now just as important to have brand loyalty and positive perception and to achieve this, the quality and reward of the customer experience needs to maximized in all possible ways. Marketing was traditionally seen as a fusion between creativity and science but in the digital era of personalization and internet savviness, a new equation has come into play – the fusion between customer and technology.
Here at Motionlab we are acutely aware of the hardships and challenges of the last two years. But we share the optimism for the future and believe we will pull through, using change as the catalyst to create a hopefully better world.
Danny Holman, Motionlab